Hey folks,

I had written a post yesterday night(or today early morning), after a long time. But, it was too serious and I felt kinda bad. So, here’s a post with all the nice things.

Class is getting less rigorous and more funny now-a-days. Many thanks to Saranyan, Sandhya, Arun, Virus, Poorna, Anand et al for keeping me cheerfully occupied on campus.

I kinda initiated a small process to change the content on my institute’s website. The content was/is pretty old, dry and boring. So, I volunteered and wrote fresh content for the website with a lot more contemporary language. It was a nice process of learning, collaborating with the management and arriving at trade-offs on what words to use where without affecting the freshness of the content. I kinda learnt the difference in thought process between our generation and the previous one. It is VERY visible, mind you!

I also showed them how there was no original ‘controllable’ content with respect to my institute, on Google’s first SERP. I myself felt the approach was a bit rude but it was the best one I could use to convince them to have a strong Social Media presence. I gave the management a plan that was approved provisionally. Haven’t begun work on it yet. Will do, after the mini-vacation. The plan is pretty strong and clear. I’m trying to document the plan into a 6-7 post series for the Electrosocial Blog. Let’s see. Should be done soon.

The first trimester exams came and went. With a lot of fanfare, I must admit. Let’s stop talking about it now, shall we?!

Had a lot of fun meeting Saranyan, Vinay and Srinath over a relaxed Sunday breeze at Bessie Beach. Separate post coming up on that!

Woke up to a wild idea one fine morning and ended up thinking on it all week. It’s grown well into a fine, neat plan now. Roped in LVS and Vinay. We’re now trying to see if we can make it a startup company, our first in life (together and individually). Again, let’s see. Should happen mostly.

TEDxChennai is shaping up VERY well. I’m kinda proud to be one of the active organisers! IIT Madras and RTBI have agreed to co-host the event. So, it’s slated to happen at the IC&SR Auditorium inside IIT Madras on November 29th, 2009. We are now looking into the nitty-gritties of the event. Hopefully, things should fall into place soon. Made some nice friends as a result of this commitment! Raja, Jo, Balajee, Benny and the big man himself, Kiruba!

There was initially a plan to work on a research paper on (a topic in) Branding. I had bootstrapped the idea but had to let go of it temporarily, for reasons best left untold here. During the mini vacation, I had the chance to speak to Milind about it and managed to get a lot of gyaan. Roped in Saranyan, the thalaivar. Will begin preliminary work on it soon. Doesn’t look like it’ll get done in anytime within a year. So, this is one of my longer commitments. But the kind of work involved is really wow. Should keep me motivated to work.

Heard of the NASSCOM Product Conclave 2009 and checked out the details. Sounded wow. Roped in Saranyan and registered sincerely, as Students. Macho discounts, I tell you! And, amazing value. Can’t wait to catch Guy Kawasaki! So, will be out of town on October 27th and 28th 2009. Bengaluru, here we come!

Found some amazing people to connect with, on Twitter. Mostly as a result of me attending the Chennai Tweetup on 11th October at Mast Kalandhar. A few more people from LinkedIn and Facebook.

Raja (the total thalaivar) sent me an invite to Google Wave, a deed for which I’d prolly waive the treat he owes me!

Will write more in another post.

Yours Skeptically,

P.S. Separate posts on (second) college life, Google Wave, nice people I’ve met in the last 3 months, Social Media addiction, the Bessie Beach meetup et al would come up in the next few days!

Hey folks,

This is my first blog post from college. I’m kinda having fun here. Not started studying, as may be evident from the long gtalk sessions!

It’s been a nice month, this one. I’ve realised that I was more observant than I had ever imagined. I had managed to notice a lot of things that others seemingly missed. Things that relate to most people’s lives for that matter.

Other than that, there has been a lot of progress on the work front. A social media internship for a company called Electrosocial has been the most happening thing for the last 2-3 weeks. I’m kinda liking it a lot. The content is delivered twice a week and packs a lot of insight with relevant links for further reading. I was even asked to post once on their blog and contrary to my guest-post record, the post has come out very well!

You can find it here. About a month of the internship is left and I think it’s only going to be more interesting!

I also got my hands dirty with a small-time market research project for the college involving life insurance. Learnt a lot of things about professionalism and how it doesn’t come with age and 2 years IT work experience for certain people. A lot of networking with some CXOs from the insurance industry as well. Not that I knew enough about insurance to engage them in conversations!

Other than that, I’ve kinda dusted my old stuff a bit and have started working on a small idea I had in the past. I’ve luckily found people to work on it with, this time. So, you can expect a post on that in the future on this blog. It would involve research, more research and even more research. But not the typical geek nerd research! This is more of logical analysis relating to life.

Me and 2 other people here have kinda developed a business idea and would be working on polishing it soon. Hope that works out as well. It’s a nice thing and fits the current market well. There is a funny thingie here! We had actually spent serious time researching for some business ideas and we thought of this one while randomly chit-chatting in class!

I’m going to be involved in organising an event in Chennai in November. Though this is still in the preliminary stages, I’m sure it would pick up momentum in the coming weeks and would be an amazingly fun experience for me.

A couple of conferences, some contests, (hopefully) one research paper, a video for Sit and some work for Mozilla are other stuff in the pipeline.

This post also serves as a reminder for me. I tend to get a little too forgetful and irresponsible if I don’t have my commitments listed in a single place!

As for the post title, I’m kinda experiencing early signs of insomnia. It’s a state I’ve forced onto myself, in a way. I’m hoping to take a week off sometime in end August. Let’s see if that works out!

Yours Skeptically,

P.S. Most of the content on this post was completed in college but the computer guy got mad and drove me off the lab. Apparently, I hear he hates working. Understandable. India still has a lot of scope for change!

Hey folks,

I’ve gotten this sudden obsession with attending off-beat workshops that give you new ways of looking at things in life. I’m even putting aside a sum of money as reserve for my workshop spending.

I’ve been exposed to a few such initiatives after meeting Milind, namely LIFE Academy and The Landmark Forum. I have not tried both of them but will do so in the near future, once I can afford them!

Milind started a group (early this year) called Career Cats Chennai which focuses on exposing young corporate professionals to business skills like workplace dynamics, when and why to switch jobs, negotiation skills, how best to sell themselves & land offers and more. As part of the group’s activities, there would be 2 interesting mini-workshops, one each, on June 13th and 14th 2009.

The first workshop (on June 13th 2009) would be on Creating Off-beat Resumes. It is said that the average time that a recruiter spends on a resume is less than 10 minutes. Given the economic slowdown and related business pressures, this could come down to even 3-4 minutes. I have always believed that a good, consistent and clear personal brand is the best way to land a coveted job. In that sense, a resume would be the first-point formal expression of one’s personal brand. You can make it look like any other resume, namely a collection of facts and numbers about yourself. Or, you can make it look like an outright advertisement selling yourself. The difference is a bit subtle and, probably, I’m not getting it through very accurately. I’m sure you’d have all seen ‘Data Sheets’ and ‘Brochures’ of Cell-phones. This is kinda like that. The idea it to make both available but subtly promote the brochure more.

The second workshop (on June 14th) would be on Cracking Job Interviews. To most of us, this will sound like a highly cliche’d idea. But, trust me. It need not always be. If you’ve had my experiences, you’d probably know that an interview is not just about landing the job alone. There is a lot more to it. I don’t want to talk more on this because I might well be intruding into the content of the workshop.

Both the workshops will be delivered by Milind and would be highly focussed, result-oriented, lateral stuff.

I’d be glad to send you more information about the workshops, the venue, the costs et al if you’re interested. Just put a comment on this post and indicate your email ID.

Yours Skeptically,

P.S. I am planning to organise a lecture series, soon. Just looking for a few things to crystallize. More info on that in a separate post.

Hey folks,

It’s been a really long time since I wrote on this space. A lot of things have happened in life since the last time I wrote and it wouldn’t be possible to write about all of them together in a single post. I prefer to split them into various posts, each one focussing on a particular event/incident/learning/person.

This post is about an awesome person whom I came to know recently, Milind Jadhav. Randomness has led me to meet some of my closest friends in life. People like Pavithra, Raja M, Kunal Shah are some examples where both of us have no idea how we first met! That has been the case here too.

Milind is one of those typical branding gurus that you read about in the business newspapers. An IIM Bangalore graduate with a strong passion towards advertising, Milind has about 15+ years of advertising/branding experience behind his name! We both share that little passion.

But, what inspired me was not that. Milind has now almost given up advertising to take up his role as a ‘ Personal Branding Trainer and Life Skills Coach’. That’s what impressed me. I don’t see many people do that in life, especially at that age and with that kind of a background.

Milind has a strong passion towards helping people live their lives in better ways, as well. He writes on Daily Life Lessons about various things that provoke thought about how and why we are the way we are. I see that blog going places in the near future!

Milind is a lot into personal branding and has even developed his own version of a personal branding workshop, The Brand YOU Workshop, from scratch. I had the privilege of attending the inaugural edition of that workshop and I must say it is an amazing piece of work. It gives you a good framework to start off on your approach towards creating a brand around yourself.

Though the process is based mainly on good-old self-introspection, Milind has tried to put in a lot of examples, interesting exercises and other such things and has made the workshop very interesting. Let me warn you that the workshop exercises are heavy on the mind as such but the way Milind takes you through them is probably the best way to do it.

More information about the workshop can be found here. Let me also tell you that there is no popular time-tested kind of a trainer for personal branding in India, as of now. So, it’s pretty fortunate that Milind stays in Chennai and operates out of Chennai primarily!

He’s got a very infectious smile and a good sense of humour, in case you’re wondering if he’s this big corporate grouch!

Chennai's own Personal Branding Trainer!

I guess that’s it for now. Will post on Sit’s first unconference shortly.

Yours Skeptically,

P.S. I have made several minute changes to this blog. The most obvious would be the title of the blog and this signature. I have also enabled comment moderation because this blog is being followed by a lot of respectable people now.